UK.gov's minimum booze price dream demolished Economists at the Office of Fair Trading have quietly demolished the UK government's case for minimum alcohol pricing. Minimum pricing regulations are likely to see more booze sold than ever, they predict, contrary to the government's desire to curtail alcohol consumption. Profiteering is also likely, with higher alcohol …
I think much or all of the Co-op shop's wines are "Fair Trade" now, which means that it's made by little enclaves of socialists all around the world. That isn't necessarily the main point, and it may add to the price as well as to the diversity, but it's nice to know that the grape farmers aren't downtrodden along with their product.
Its a very rich coming from MP's who don't have to pay taxes on the 'cheap' beer they get in the house of commons bar where they also occasionally get into drunken brawls. Its their typical thinking though.... put the price up and that will solve everything!
Whats next another attempt at prohibition? Or are we going to start seeing how much obesity costs the NHS and put minimum prices on Mc'Donalds, KFC and Burger King. Of course when people stop eating out they'll target the supermarkets again with minimum prices on your favorite cook at home junk food. We've already got a pasty tax!
"Its a very rich coming from MP's who don't have to pay taxes on the 'cheap' beer they get in the house of commons bar where they also occasionally get into drunken brawls. Its their typical thinking though.... put the price up and that will solve everything!"
That or they're drinking expensive wines and brandy that will remain unaffected.
This 'safety measure' only 'protects' poor people. Rich alcohlics remain utterly unaffected.
"This 'safety measure' only 'protects' poor people. Rich alcohlics remain utterly unaffected."
That's the problem with targetting any such issue by price: If you are rich enough you bypass it.
Take an example I have been arguing for: Cars.
If you take a (standard) motorbike test, you are restricted to the power output of the bike you can ride for 2 years. Yet someone could take their test in a 1l Corsa, having only ever driven that car, then go out and legally drive a Bugatti Veyron the same day. As a more realistic example, their parents could put them on their insurance and let them drive their 3l family estate.
I believe there should be a restriction on the car a person can drive for the first couple of years or so after passing their test.
This is the most common argument I hear: "But there is already a restriction. They can't afford insurance on bigger cars." But this does not apply to the 'rich'. So why is it OK to do it if you are 'rich' and not if you are 'poor'?
If you are trying to stop something for real reasons, raising prices is not the way to do it as those who can afford it will continue to do so. It will also encourage (not cause) more crime from the less well off to get round it, and will hurt people who it was not targetted at (e.g. in this case responsible drinkers will have to pay more, even though the regs are not targetted at them).
"Or are we going to start seeing how much obesity costs the NHS and put minimum prices on Mc'Donalds, KFC and Burger King. Of course when people stop eating out they'll target the supermarkets again with minimum prices on your favourite cook at home junk food." -- I think you've nailed it.
Once the drinking "problem" is "solved", then they'll be looking for something else. And taxing food would be the absolute holy grail, because everybody has to eat. It will begin as a tax on the unhealthiest foods, which almost nobody will object to (not least because objectors will be shouted down as tantamount to condoning child murder). Once such a tax is established, it will then gradually creep in scope, budget by budget ("we're going to start taxing potatoes, because they can be made into chips"); until eventually you won't be able to buy an oil-free, salt-free, egg-free, vinegar-free, taste-free organic rocket salad without paying tax on it.
"Once the drinking "problem" is "solved", then they'll be looking for something else. And taxing food would be the absolute holy grail, because everybody has to eat. It will begin as a tax on the unhealthiest foods"
You already pay tax on luxury foods. You have for years.
Also: If rocket salad doesn't taste of anything to you, you've clearly screwed your tastebuds somewhere. It's the McDonald's salt-burgers that are bland.
I have absolutely no evidence to support my hunch that the report which Andrew finds so convincing is in some way sponsored by the retailers.
And the "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)" does not sound like a body interested in public health or anti-social behaviour. It sounds like a body that wants us to buy as much stuff as possible. Wikipedia first sentence: "...founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade...". Prime policy: "to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth..."
Oh, and what I don't understand is why "Temperance" really means "Abstinence". To me, being 'temperate' is 'moderation', (Like, a can of beer in the Sauna on a Friday night) but the Temperance Society requires total abstinence...Corrections greatfully received.
Not really classy - there's reckoned to be one sauna for every three people in Finland. (Found a floating one the other day, outboard motor, rooftop barbecue, outboard motor to pootle down the river, and it's for hire, FFS!!)
Last 4 apartments I lived in, each had its own sauna in the bathroom, including the current place. (Others were communal in the basement, just book a time) Bit of a waste of space, really, we use it only once or twice a month because it's a serious power-hog (60 amp. fuse), and it's not much smaller than the bathroom. Grief, if you want to be REALLY clean, can't be beaten. Follow 95 deg. Celcius, loads of steam with running outside to jump through a hole in the ice in the adjacent lake, wash, rinse, repeat a couple of times. You've never felt better in your entire life!
@JDX
While I accept that on one level the two aren't comparable (we're more dependent on transport than we are on a supply of beer, unless you're taking "quality of life" metrics very seriously) there are some circumstances where they can be compared.
A lot of the rationalisation for increasing fuel duty has been that drivers should be encouraged to seek out alternative transport. Which, you know, is great if you're in London and have an easy tube/overground route. Not so much if you either have no public transport option or are limited to the still-wallet-fistingly-expensive train companies as an alternative.
For those in the latter scenario, the notional justification does not apply and therefore the net result is an increase in tax paid.
A minimum price strategy by itself primarily suits the retailers as it allows them to increase the profitability per unit of all units sold. To achieve real social change (whether benevolent or otherwise!) requires a more sophisticated and ambitious strategy as it will require modification of social behaviours, and will have impacts on a number of people.
is your Friday night puker on the pavement drinker actually an alcoholic in the addiction sense of the word? The question is more about people who allegedly front load on cheap supermarket booze before going out on the town. Might help the pub trade a bit too if there's less of a difference between pub and supermarket prices.
Personally I reckon high alcohol prices encourage binge drinking.
Can't afford to go out for a quiet drink after work regularly? Just save it all up for one massive bender a month instead. When drinking is expensive it becomes more of a rare social event that you may feel you can overindulge on.
Wow... finally. Someone tells the government the sodding obvious.
It's a tax on the poor. £25 bottles of wine will remain unaffected. All the rich dickheads telling me that binge drinking is three pints of bitter on a Friday night will still sit at dinner parties and get slaughtered just as much, for the same amount of money.
Those who drink cheaply at home before going out will simply have one less in the pub (further screwing over our pubs), and one more at home, in order to spend the same amount. Or they'll stand around in the street with a can making the place look untidy. I'd rather people went into pubs than harassed passers by, thanks.
Those addicted and on the breadline will simply make sacrifices and go without in other areas: Their kids will have less, they'll spend less on food, whatever it takes. Serious addicts don't quit due to price hikes.
This was always the most fucking stupid idea since "we won't give pilots parachutes, because then they'll jump out of their planes rather than fight the Germans."
Mines a pint. At a sensible price. I need it to help me cope with all the other moronic shit our governments keep piling on us.
What are you on about?
1)People getting sloshed at a dinner party don't then run amok at closing time, or ruin the town centre for those wanting a nice dinner or a pint out.
2)It's the home-bought booze which is the whole target of this idea in the first place, so people are if anything going to see the pub seem cheaper in comparison since pubs charge massively over the minimum prices already.
"1)People getting sloshed at a dinner party don't then run amok at closing time, or ruin the town centre for those wanting a nice dinner or a pint out."
1a) That might be true if these measures were about reducing crime and noise, but we're being told that it's about 'health'. So are you saying that we are being lied to in order to get legislation through under false pretence? That's not a good thing.
1b) People who buy cheap drink from an offie aren't the ones running amok at *closing time*, because they are unaffected by it! The people running amok at closing time are the ones who've been in the pubs and clubs, paying through the nose and are thus *not the ones affected by this, either*.
If the problem is your eyes is louts pissed in the street then solve it via the correct medium of a) Nicking the bastards. b) Making it illegal to drink in the street in problem areas, as many councils do. c) Make it better to drink either in pubs or at home by keeping prices *lower*.
"2)It's the home-bought booze which is the whole target of this idea in the first place, so people are if anything going to see the pub seem cheaper in comparison since pubs charge massively over the minimum prices already."
Making supermarkets more expensive is not going to make more people go to pubs, when people can't afford pubs anyway. It just means that people will drink a higher ratio outside of the pubs.
If you want more people to drink inside then pubs need to have their tax rates reduced.
And let's not ignore the fact that most of the people standing around in the street with a beer are there because they're being made to stand outside to smoke...
Justifying the increase using health is biggest load of bo**ocks in the world, if they really want to start playing that game are they also going to look at:
industrial accidents and stick charges on a Business Accidents Tax
motoring accidents and increase road tax to cover it
horse riding
extreme sports injuries
smoking (already been done)
pot hole and kerb falls (if they fixed the bloody things in the first place)
obesity
drugs (always the funny one, they have to treat people but since they wont legalise and tax it the whole cost is an expense)
in fact some to think of it, why dont we just get rid of the nhs and pay private. would be cheaper.
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If we're drinking less alcohol, then more alcohol is available for use as biofuel. Which you hate because it is a measure to prevent global warming.
Alcohol addiction doesn't happen quickly, and if booze is too expensive then people won't be able to afford enough of it to addict themselves. Even journalists. Oh?, maybe -that's- the issue.
But if this bothers you, then, season 3, episode 4 of Channel 4's "SuperScrimpers" TV show - last week's - features prominently a couple of students who have been spending £11,000 a year on booze, presumably keeping receipts so that this fact can be determined; they are challenged to hold an end-of-term party with just £50 to spend on the booze this time. Watching them debate how many potatoes they need to buy didn't actually happen, sadly, as it would have been hilarious, but they do buy supermarket plain-label vodka so it is really the same thing. That's all I remember, it's probably all -they- remember...
"Alcohol addiction doesn't happen quickly, and if booze is too expensive then people won't be able to afford enough of it to addict themselves. Even journalists. Oh?, maybe -that's- the issue."
I once saw a television commercial when two guys had to choose between a six-pack and toilet paper. They took the six-pack and eagerly took the receipt. When it comes to serious vice addiction, nothing matters but the vice. If it's a choice between bread and booze, it's booze any day. It's true with alcohol (Thus why so much effort into evading alcohol restrictions--grandfathered "after-hours" bars, beat-the-clock rushes to the supermarket, across-the-state-line trips just to get those precious 40's) and it's true with tobacco (ask yourself this, "Who most often calls cigarettes 'cancer sticks'?" A: The smokers themselves--they know it'll kill them, but they don't care as they feel they're dead anyway and are just picking their poison).
As for the underage, making it harder to get just makes it all the more alluring. It's not the buzz they're usually seeking but more the fact that the buzz means they're rebelling. Like haters, there's little you can do with rebels: they'll rebel simply because they want to, and trying to stop them is itself a reason to rebel. The only way you can combat this is to remove the "forbidden fruit" effect, but that means letting kids drink legally, which in this age of less parental responsibility, that's not gonna happen.
Enthusiasm isn't the same thing as addiction. I presume that your commercial was to promote a booze brand and not to raise awareness of alcoholism. And do I correctly understand that these drinkers intended to use the store receipt as their toilet paper supply? Shades of the old shiny stuff you used to get in institutions. At least you can wash it clean and re-use it.
And addiction comes with habitual excessive exposure. Putting up the price of booze will restrict excessive drinking and therefore will prevent the development of true addiction.
Also, home brewing is fairly tricky. Your habitual drunk is probably not going to successfully produce any alcohol by hOme brewing because they'll be too pissed, so that is self-limiting too. Of course, once they sober up, they can probably manage the brewing. In between, there may be an equilibrium...
Enthusiasm LEADS TO addiction because these people don't know when to STOP. And like others have said, making it harder for them to get booze just makes them turn to alternative sources which will INEVITABLE crop up (if not from them than from opportunistic entrepreneurs who can smell the money). That's one of the big lessons taught by US Prohibition--some addictions are so deeply rooted in history that they've become SOCIETAL—too big for any one country to control (IOW, they'd sooner go to war with their COUNTRY than go to war with their VICE, the same thing's happening for tobacco). Drinkers gonna drink, smokers gonna smoke, people gonna fill their demands, and there's I dare say very little you can do about it short of descending into an Orwellian-type society given the amount of control it would need to actually pull a prohibition off successfully.
I believe that higher prices will discourage over-enthusiastic drinkers and thus will prevent them becoming addicts. But you make some telling points.
But while there -are- criminals around selling untaxed tobacco (often poor quality counterfeit of respected brands) and indeed untaxed alcohol, the latter isn't a particularly hot busines at the moment. They need to be cheaper to buy than the legal stuff, and at the same time more profitable; this is achieved by including the unpaid tax in your profit (you being the bootleg booze dealer), and by selling low quality stuff with a high quality label on.
"Alcohol addiction doesn't happen quickly, and if booze is too expensive then people won't be able to afford enough of it to addict themselves."
No, poor people won't. Only people who don't buy cheap vodka will be able to be drunk.
That's the problem: It doesn't solve the issue at all. It only affects students and those on the breadline.
And if you think either of those groups are going to be deterred just by mere cash getting in the way, you're smoking the same thing as they are in Westminster.
Additionally: Look at -say- Finland and the Middle East. Booze is extortionately expensive, so people just drink cheap, dangerous moonshine... and get even drunker, even cheaper.
Just shows how all these complaints about student fees and wotnot are b***cks - students are obviously rolling in money, pouring booze down their throat every night and - judging by the rubbish piled up every July/September around here - throwing away and repurchasing thousands of pounds-worth of electronic equipment/consumer electronics every year.
If you want to be believed about how poor being a student is, behave that way.
There seem to be two problems that need tackling: effects of excessive drinking on long-term health and public order issues.
The second one is easy to tackle with existing laws - enforce them. It's an offence to sell alcohol to or for someone who is drunk - so just send a plain-clothes copper with a video camera to wander round the town centre pubs at 11.30 on a Friday and then prosecute all the bar staff - £1000 fine each will probably have an effect. And then enforce the various 'drunk and disorderly' offences - stop being nice to drunks who throw up in the street, instead give them all a £80 fixed penalty once they've stopped vomiting - much more effective than charging an extra 25p per drink.
The first problem is harder, as that's back to the problem of an addict, but hopefully stopping people getting totally rat-arsed several times every weekend will have a positive impact on their health.
Couldn't agree more!
I would actually go a stage further and issue people, at 18, with a drinking license, which must be presented every time you purchase alcohol. If you are caught drunk and disorderly, you are suspended from drinking for x weeks/months. Assault etc. while under the influence, or drink driving, get's you a longer ban. Anyone selling to or buying for someone without a license, just as with underage now, gets fined. It would also help with underage drinking.
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Amazing how many people come on here and bleat about the supposed price increases and claim that a single report claims that increasing prices will increase consumption. Come on! How often have we seen that - price increases usually (though not always) are followed by reduction in consumption. take petrol for example - despite what someone said earlier, car usage IS down and plenty of people blame highest ever petrol prices.
Also, what about tobacco duty? Should we drastically reduce the duty on tobacco in the hope that consumption will also drastically fall? Now that contains a real addictive drug and consumption has been seen to fall due to ever increasing prices, and if we haven't seen an increase in crime due to nicotine addicts doing anything to get their fix then I think we can predict that alcohol price increases (which happen every budget anyway) won't result in a crime spree caused by alcoholics.
"Amazing how many people come on here and bleat about the supposed price increases and claim that a single report claims that increasing prices will increase consumption."
Frankly, raising the price of Stella is not going to reduce the amount of £20 a bottle port I drink.
"Also, what about tobacco duty? Should we drastically reduce the duty on tobacco in the hope that consumption will also drastically fall?"
Since the duty increases, most people I know either have the money not to give a toss and just carried on, or have simply switched to rollies, and buy their tobacco overseas. It's not changed anything. The only thing that has decreased their smoking is getting older and wider, and being made to stand in the rain.
You can't control behaviour through prices. People enjoy luxuries and will sacrifice things for them. Give someone only enough money to feed themselves, and they'll go hungry a couple of times a week in order to do the things that they enjoy. That's the way people work.
If all what you said is true, why did London feel a need to further increase the congestion charge? Why does every city still have traffic issues every day? Why do I still see lots of people smoking? etc etc continue ad-nauseum.
The demand for all things that require a payment is inelastic, as price increases demand decreases. The important point is that it isn't linear. To achieve the stated goal - cutting consumer consumption - would require a significant increase, magnitudes higher than 50p.
As an illustration, think about a pay rise, most people get one annually. If the pay rise is not significant - <5% - the monetary change seems to make no difference; it takes a magnitude change - >10% - before any significant change in circumstances is witnessed. The same is true of penal taxation.
One could argue that the reduction in tobacco consumption is as much or more to do with a change in attitudes and awareness of the health dangers than the pricing. Besides there is a roaring and ever-increasing black market in tobacco now. That complicates health studies, deprives the treasury of income and funds other smuggling activities (some you may approve of but these are not nice people ultimately!).
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